The Living Vocabulary
A working glossary for The Physics of Meaning.
These definitions evolve as the framework does. Browse by the map of the whole architecture, or jump straight to a term you already have in mind.
A dictionary tells you what a word means. This is meant to feel more like a map — five layers, from the oldest questions to how the framework actually gets used.
Fields
Processes
Practices
A
Attention
The selective allocation of awareness. Attention determines what becomes available for perception, interpretation, and action.
Why It MattersWhat receives sustained attention acquires significance; what remains unseen rarely gets transformed.
Attentional Literacy
The capacity to notice what's being selected, amplified, ignored, or conditioned by attention.
Foundational EssaySymbolic Literacy
Agency
The capacity to respond rather than merely react. Agency emerges when awareness widens perceived possibility and allows participation to become intentional.
B
Biological Field
The distributed organization of living systems through genetics, physiology, ecology, and adaptation.
Body Before the Word
The principle that lived experience often precedes conscious explanation. The body registers coherence, contradiction, and significance before language fully articulates them.
C
Circle and the Line
The first symbolic language through which movement and transformation became visible within this framework. The circle represents continuity, relation, and return; the line represents direction, differentiation, and emergence.
Consciousness
The capacity to register, integrate, and reflect upon experience. Here, consciousness is not merely awareness but the possibility of participating differently.
D
Discernment
The practice of distinguishing perception from projection, symbol from literal claim, and pattern from coincidence.
E
Embodied Awareness
Awareness grounded in lived bodily experience rather than abstract thought alone.
Ecological Field
The network of relationships among organisms, environments, and place through which life becomes possible.
F
Field
A distributed pattern of relationships that shapes what becomes possible within it. Fields organize probabilities rather than determining outcomes.
The Fields of Meaning
The interacting substrate and operative fields through which experience becomes organized and meaning emerges.
Foundational EssayThe Physics of Meaning
G
God as Verb
A theological orientation that understands the sacred not primarily as a static object, but as living participation, relation, creativity, and becoming.
I
Inner Gravity
The first articulation of the intuition that meaning behaves as though it carries weight — drawing attention, organizing interpretation, and shaping perceived possibility.
Interpretation
The act of assigning significance to perception. Perception asks "what is here?" Interpretation asks "what does this mean?"
M
Meaning
Significance emerging through relationships rather than residing inside isolated objects. Meaning is relational before it is personal.
Meaning Field
The network of relationships through which something acquires significance.
Movement
The original insight beneath the framework. Before language, concept, or symbol, there is movement — the continuous transformation through which reality unfolds.
Mythic Knowing
A mode of perception in which recurring images, symbols, stories, and archetypes reveal patterns before they become explicit concepts.
N
Narrative Field
The distributed pattern of stories, roles, assumptions, and anticipated endings through which experience becomes organized across time.
Nervous-System Field
The dynamic landscape of regulation, threat, openness, and habit through which bodily experience is organized.
P
Participation
The process through which individuals continually reproduce, modify, or transform the fields they inhabit.
Pattern Literacy
The capacity to recognize recurring forms, relationships, rhythms, and organizational structures across experience.
Perception
The registration of what is present before interpretation organizes its meaning.
Perceptual Awareness
Awareness of the positions through which experience is known — Observer, Witness, and Experiencer.
Physical Field
Measurable relationships governing matter, energy, space, and time.
Possibility Field
The range of actions, identities, relationships, and futures perceived as genuinely available.
Q
Quality of Participation
A principle for evaluating whether participation increases or diminishes agency, responsibility, relationship, presence, and freedom.
R
Relational Field
The dynamic pattern emerging whenever two or more beings participate together.
Relational Intelligence
The capacity to perceive self, other, and the larger field simultaneously, and to respond in ways that increase coherence, responsibility, and relationship.
Relationship
The fundamental condition through which meaning emerges. Relationships are not secondary connections between isolated things — they're constitutive of how experience becomes possible.
S
Somatic Literacy
The ability to recognize and interpret bodily sensation as meaningful information, without assuming that every sensation is a literal fact about the external world.
Symbolic Field
The domain of shared images, language, metaphor, ritual, and cultural meaning.
Symbolic Literacy
The practice of reading meaning through symbols, patterns, relationships, and embodied experience. It develops four foundational capacities: Attentional, Pattern, Temporal, and Somatic Literacy.
T
Technological Field
The distributed influence of tools, media, algorithms, and infrastructures on perception, memory, attention, and participation.
Temporal Literacy
The capacity to recognize rhythm, sequence, timing, recurrence, and developmental change.
Transformation
The process by which participation reorganizes relationships, fields, and future possibilities.
W
Witness
The capacity to remain present with experience without immediately identifying with, resisting, or controlling it.
Social Field
The distributed structures of institutions, norms, power, culture, and shared expectations.